Editor's note: Historical Perspective is a new feature to accommodate unsolicited articles that deal with historical records and personal perspectives of early geophysics. These invaluable documents are usually written in styles of their own that would often require extensive editing, reorganization, and/or fact verification to suit TLE standards—a process which could, in turn, rob them of their patina and even historical value. To differentiate them from Profiles, Mentoring, and other regular TLE human interest articles, and acknowledge their unique status as historical documents is the reason the Editorial Board has created this new feature. Here, these unsolicited and sometimes unorthodox...